Killing Diana (2022) Movie Script

-She was princess for the ages...
-This is a beautiful, innocent girl
getting married to a handsome prince
and getting whisked off to live happily ever after.
-...whose radiance took us by storm...
-She carried herself almost like an angel,
if an angel was a superhero.
-...and whose love fostered a new generation of royals ready
to change the monarchy.
But soon, the weight of the crown became too much
for this mere mortal to bear.
-The press is on her tail the whole time.
She was not treated like a human.
She was treated like prey.
-Diana, Princess of Wales, has, in fact, been killed.
-Now, 25 years after tragedy,
we're looking back at the extraordinary life and legacy
of the people's princess...
-She was so fierce and so strong,
and she could overcome anything.
-...and how destiny took her from the world far too soon.
-It just felt like an incredibly vital, vicious loss.


-Diana, Princess of Wales, has been killed
in a car accident and that her partner,
Dodi Fayed, has also been killed.
-I remember exactly where I was when I found out
Princess Diana died.
A friend called me up to tell me,
and I actually thought -- I misunderstood her.
Could she really be dead?
We were in disbelief.
-It is this enormously shocking moment.
This is someone who we have been following
since she was 19 years old.
-I was, like, 14, and I broke down
because I idolized her so much.
-How could this woman, who was so full of life
and just really getting her life started,
at just 36 years old with two young boys,
and finding her voice, died in a car crash.
It was just unbelievable.
-No one could have envisioned such a tragic ending
for the people's princess, less than two decades
after she burst onto the world stage.

Despite often being described as a commoner,
Diana Spencer is actually
born into the British aristocracy in 1961.
-The Spencer family --
they were kind of in with the royal family for centuries.
They were really, really wealthy landowners.
So she came from a very high-born family.
-She was the daughter of an earl.
Even though she wasn't a member of the peerage herself,
she grew up in aristocratic circles.
Her family was very close to the royal family.
Their estate, while she was a young girl,
was on the Sandringham Estate.
They were neighbors with the royal family.
-She grew up nearby the royals.
She used to be taken to go play
with Prince Edward and Prince Andrew
when she was a child.
-At age 9, Diana is sent off to a series of boarding schools
to help groom her for her life of privilege.
-It was the kind of boarding school that's like,
"We are not here to teach your daughters academics, really.
We're here to make them socially charming and graceful."
It was essentially a glorified finishing school.
-When young ladies of earls and and the aristocracy come of age,
they are given their rightful title.
And Diana was Lady Diana Spencer.
So this very much set her apart from normal, everyday,
common people.
-Two years later, the 16-year-old's life
and the very trajectory of the monarchy itself
will change forever when Diana catches the attention
of a curious caller to her father's estate --
none other than Charles, Prince of Wales
and heir apparent to the British throne.
Charles dated Diana's older sister, Sarah.
He came to visit, and Diana was hanging around.
And I think Charles was definitely caught by Diana
and paid attention to her,
which Sarah definitely didn't like.
-Prince Charles was dating a lot of different women.
He was out skiing and kind of enjoying,
you know, his early 30s.
-He had a string of relationships
that were documented in the press.
I think it was over a dozen.
He actually proposed to two of them.
Sarah was ultimately deemed unsuitable by the palace
because she spoke to the press about their relationship,
which is the number one capital offense
in the eyes of the royal family.
So we needed to find someone who would do the job, not complain.
-The queen and Prince Philip said to him,
"It is time for you to settle down
and it's time for you to slow down.
You need to find a wife.
You need to start producing some children. We need an heir.
You have to keep this succession going."
And that is when Charles decided
to get serious about finding a future partner.
-A few years after their accidental encounter,
Prince Charles begins dating lady Diana Spencer.
-When you date someone in the royal family,
you're not going on dates.
You are having chaperoned encounters with said royal.
So they would do things like go to the theater.
She would go watch him play polo.
She would go to his family's estate, Balmoral.
-The royal family is impressed with Charles's new paramour.
-When Diana first met
Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, at the time,
all accounts say that she was really charming.
The entire family was enchanted by her.
But apparently, Prince Philip was particularly charmed
and was the one who really encouraged his son
that she was the one and that he needed to move forward
with potentially proposing to her.
-I think she looked, to a lot of people on paper,
like a perfect royal match.
She was from this established royal family.
She was beautiful and young and innocent.
She was so young that she had never had a serious boyfriend.
There was no checkered past that could come out
and embarrass the royal family.
-Diana is immediately thrust into the white-hot spotlight
of the London tabloids --
a place she'll painfully navigate
for the rest of her brief life.

-Pictures were plastered all over newspapers,
all over magazines.
Who is this woman that captured Prince Charles's heart?
This was all new to Princess Diana.
She got that nickname, Shy Di, because
she was always turning her head to the side
because she didn't really know how to interact with the media.
-She graduates and she takes herself off to London,
where she sort of flits around from job to job.
She works as a maid cleaning her sister's house.
She has a flat that she rents out to some of her friends.
Eventually, she gets a job as an assistant teacher
in a kindergarten classroom.
-When a photographer captures a 19-year-old Diana
in this 1980 image, it causes a media sensation.
-The story is that Diana
was working at her kindergarten classroom
and a photographer showed up and asked her to come outside
and take a few pictures for him.
She's sort of playing with some of the kids,
and then all of a sudden,
the sun comes out from behind a cloud
and it backlights this long skirt
that she is wearing, and her legs become visible.
-And this was considered quite scandalous.
For a possible future queen
to be having her silhouette all out there in the open,
ooh, that was quite a moment.
-And after that, the country just becomes
intoxicated with Diana.
They are following her everywhere she goes.
-There were instances of paparazzi
hounding her at her apartment.
They even rented a flat opposite her
so that they could get shots through the window.
-But the unwanted attention does little
to discourage her relationship with the prince.
-Diana and Prince Charles's romance
was definitely a whirlwind.
-It really harkened back to the courtships
and arranged marriages of old in royal and aristocratic circles.
-Then, on February 3rd, 1981,
after just five months of dating,
the public finally gets its wish.
-Charles proposed to Diana.
He did not get down on one knee, and he did not have a ring.
It wasn't posed as a romantic question.
It was kind of floated as an idea of,
"Well, what if you married me
and became the Princess of Wales?"
So, yeah, not your typical fairy-tale proposal.
-Lady Di said that it genuinely felt as if she
and Charles were in love with each other.
She didn't really understand the world in the way that he had.
He'd already had multiple lovers.
He had had a great deal of adventures.
And he also understood duty. And he knew what he had to do.
Lady Diana -- she was much more naive.
She was going in with a lot of hope.
-Three weeks later,
Charles and Diana give their first official interview
announcing their engagement to the world.
-During that interview, you definitely see
the Shy Di still.
She's very timid, very reserved,
kind of letting Charles take that lead
because she doesn't really know the ins and outs
of the royal family yet, and you have to remember,
she's kind of coming into her own as a woman, as well,
and kind of figuring out who she is.
-Do you find it a daunting experience that, yesterday,
you were a nanny looking after children
and now you're about to marry the Prince of Wales
and one day would, in all likelihood, be queen?
It's a tremendous change for someone, if I may say, of 19
to make all of a sudden -- the transition.
-She is 19. He is 31.
So for Diana, Charles is this dashing, handsome,
worldly heir to the throne.
And I think Charles seems very flattered by this beautiful,
naive young girl
looking up at him like he'd built the world for her.
-You can see her face in that moment.
She's like, "Huh?" Like, "What?"
"Whatever in love means."
And she kind of nods.
That was, for her, a giant red flag, where she was like,
"What does he mean by that?"
-She later says, the world just came crashing down for her.
And she knew, in that moment,
that this was not what she had wanted.
-At that moment,
he would become the villain in this story forever.
-Although Charles chooses Diana,
the teenager has no idea her fianc's heart
still belongs to one of his old flames.
-Charles had an ongoing relationship with Camilla Shand,
later Camilla Parker Bowles, throughout the 1970s.
She was a lot like him.
They shared a sense of humor.
They shared a love for English countryside life.
And she was able to relate to him in ways that other women
that he had dated weren't.
-Though Charles and Camilla had dated for almost 18 months,
the prince stops just short of proposing.
-The royals had a few issues with Camilla Parker,
and I think his family made it very clear to him
that she was not the right choice for him.
-Then, in 1973, while Charles is at sea with the Royal Navy,
Camilla receives a marriage proposal from another suitor --
British Army Officer Andrew Parker Bowles.
-And when Charles came back,
she was married to Andrew Parker-Bowles.
Of course, we know that that did not stop the romance
between Charles and Camilla.
They did end up continuing their relationship.
-But the couple will remain more than just friends
for the next two decades, driving a scorned Diana
to lash out against the monarchy like never before.
16 years before Princess Diana's tragic death
rocks the world,
all eyes are on a much more joyous occasion --
Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer's
upcoming wedding.
-At the time of Prince Charles and Princess Diana's engagement,
we hadn't had a royal wedding in years.
So this was going to be the event of the century.
-There were tea towels, there were teacup sets.
There were dinner plates. There was wall art.
I own a lot of it.
There were all sorts of knickknacks
made to commemorate this coupling.
-So, as soon as the engagement is official,
essentially, the feeding frenzy starts.
There is this enormous just burst of interest
in the idea of this fairy-tale wedding that's going to happen.
There is all of this frenzy
over what's the dress going to look like?
Normally, a royal wedding would be at Westminster Abbey,
but in this case, because there's so much interest,
they move it over to St Paul's, which holds more people.
It's a big deal.
-But with the fairy tale comes a lifelong trade-off.
-Charles and Diana are mobbed everywhere they go.
Diana talks about how she basically became, you know,
a prisoner inside her little apartment in the palace.
-Diana, at this point, is very clearly
getting kind of overwhelmed by how much is happening.
And she's sort of realizing how little she knows Charles.
-Even more troubling as the wedding date draws near,
Diana cannot escape the long shadow
cast by the prince's former girlfriend,
Camilla Parker Bowles.
-Camilla takes Diana out for lunch
to a restaurant called Mnage a Trois
and asks Diana if she's into going into the country
and going hunting and things like that.
-And Diana says no, she's more of a city person.
And Camilla says, "Oh, well, that will work out."
And Diana understands that to mean
that Camilla is sort of splitting up
their custody of Charles and Camilla is thinking,
all right, they'll have their assignations in the country,
Diana will have custody when he's in the city.
-It's an arrangement seemingly blessed
by the prince himself and tacitly supported,
or at least ignored, by the monarchy.
-Very shortly before the wedding,
Diana discovered a present
that Charles was intending to give Camilla.
It was a gold bracelet that had a "G"
and an "F" on it, for Gladys and Fred,
because those were Charles and Camilla's pet nicknames
for each other.
And she was absolutely, of course, devastated.
-So devastated, in fact, Diana considers a drastic move.
-There are stories of her
wanting to back out of the marriage
because she knew this wasn't going to be the love match
that she was dreaming of.
-She told her sisters, "I want to call off the wedding."
And Sarah, who had previously dated Charles,
said, basically, "Too late,
your face is already on all the tea towels.
You got to go through with it."
-I think she knew it wasn't really for her.
It was for everybody else.
And it was for the monarchy. It was for the world.
It was for the people.
I wonder how much she actually felt like this
was her wedding day as much as everyone else's wedding day.

-The first time I was introduced to the royals, as a little girl,
watching Princess Di walk down that aisle,
I have not been able to look away.
I was just old enough to understand what princesses were,
what royalty was.
It was the wedding of the century.
-It is watched by 750 million people.
The Super Bowl generally gets around 100 million viewers.
This is on another level.
-It was certainly this is a giant spectacular show
with her princess dress.
It had a 25-foot-long train, and it was pretty eccentric.
And it reflected what everybody wanted her to be,
this perfect princess bride.
-Diana absolutely wowed the world with her dress,
which, in hindsight, when you look at it,
is this big, poofy only in the 1980s,
very romantic, very frilly concoction.
But it was the height of fashion at the time.
And she looked so beautiful,
and she was so young and so innocent.
-As far as the nation was concerned,
the heir to the throne had found his fairy-tale bride.
-As Diana walks out of the cathedral
at the end of the wedding, she's now Princess of Wales,
HRH -- Her Royal Highness,
which is an important rank in the royal family.
She has one big important job ahead of her,
and that is to create the heir and create the spare.
-Diana will soon fulfill her obligation
and find her voice in the process,
finally pushing back on a palace determined to control her.

Less than four months after the wedding of the century,
the palace announces the princess is pregnant.
-Oh, boy, is the world happy
about this new moment for the royal family,
and for those who are on the inside,
I'm sure they're applauding, as well, because
"Yes, thank you, Prince Charles.
You did your job. You made a future king."
-But Diana's pregnancy has an unexpected consequence.
She sheds her Shy Di persona
and now openly expresses her opinion
with a groundbreaking announcement.
-For all of history,
British monarchs and their children
had had babies at home in a palace.
-Princess Diana choosing to go to the hospital to give birth
is seen as groundbreaking.
It seems common-sense now.
But back then, you know, she was seen as a heretic,
like, "Why are you doing things
that are good enough for the queen?"
Oh, it's not good enough for you?"
But Princess Diana was just saying,
"I feel more comfortable being at the hospital,
being surrounded by doctors."
-Diana was finally getting a voice.
"I'm a modern woman.
I'm going to make modern decisions for myself."
-So, even early on,
Diana decided that she was going to kind of
bend the rules a little bit in the royal family,
which was something that we haven't really seen before.
-On June 21st, 1982,
Diana delivers the crown its future king --
Prince William Arthur Philip Louis of Wales.
-I think the birth of Prince William changed things
in so many ways and that, from the beginning,
Diana was such a protective mother.
The tension between Diana and the royals
began to really come into fruition.
She was starting to really feel the pressure of having
so many eyes on not just her,
but now her firstborn son, who was, of course,
the future heir to the throne.
-One year later, in March 1983,
the new mother continues finding her voice
when she bucks royal tradition again.
-Charles and Diana were set to travel to Australia
and New Zealand for a royal tour.
Now, this was her first overseas tour
as a member of the royal family.
They were traveling for six weeks,
so it was royal protocol to leave your child
with a nanny, with a caregiver of the royal family.
Well, Diana said, you know, "I'm not doing that.
This is my child.
I don't need somebody else to mother my child."
-Of course, the palace objects.
-She was labeled by many in the royal family
and many of the aides as overly protective.
This was a family, including Queen Elizabeth,
where their children were
mostly largely raised by aides and nannies
who were actually taking care of the children on the day-to-day.
And Princess Diana was a lot more of a hands-on mom.
And from the beginning,
I think the tension between Diana and the royals
began to really come into fruition
when she had her first child.
-Diana is adamant and gives the monarchy an ultimatum.
-She would not be an animal that would go to heel.
She just stood up to the royal family.
-"I'm not going to Australia without my babies.
They're coming with me."
She introduced that concept
that we're not going to leave the kids to nannies.
She was the first, and she made a difference.
-But it's not just William the crown worries about.
-Going on your first international royal tour,
it is not easy, and the royals had concerns
about whether or not Diana can really cut the mustard.
After all, she was very young. She was a new mom.
She wasn't accustomed to doing all the press,
all of the hand-shaking, all of the red carpet.
-Diana more than holds her own in Australia.
-She was able to be this shining presence
and this representation of the monarchy
that was a breath of fresh air for people.
-The trip is an overwhelming success and propels
Diana's popularity to new heights.
-There is an instance where Charles and Diana
get out of opposite sides of their car
and they walk down two rows of people lined up to meet them.
And the side that Charles walked towards audibly groaned
when they realized that they would get the Prince
and not the Princess of Wales.
-Three cheers for Lady Di!
-Hip-hip-hooray! Hip-hip-hooray!
-Princess Diana is eclipsing Prince Charles.
The crowds are showing up for Diana and little Prince William.
They are the two that they want to see.
-There's great photos from that trip where they're sightseeing
and the crowds that came out to see them on that tour
were just mind-blowing.
They were so popular.
-As a matter of fact, she is dazzling.
She's considered a star.
Everywhere she goes, people cannot get enough of her.
[ Crowd chanting "Diana" ]
-And what quickly began to happen
on that first world tour in Australia
and New Zealand was the attention
and the spotlight were no longer really on Prince Charles,
but it was all about Princess Diana.
And that world tour is what really started to cement
Princess Diana as an icon and as someone who was beloved,
and maybe even more so
than the future king of the United Kingdom.
-The whole nation was falling in love with her.
Nobody really was interested in Charles.
-Diana's eclipsing of her princely husband
doesn't go unnoticed.
-Charles, for his part, I think, picked up on the fact
that Diana was the one that people wanted to see.
There are a couple speeches
that he gave where he essentially belittles her.
-And I've come to the conclusion
that really it would have been far easier
to have had two wives...
[ Laughter ]
...to have covered both sides of the street.
[ Laughter ]
And I could have walked down the middle,
directing the operation.
-I think there was an allure to Diana.
People felt very connected to her from the very start,
and I don't really think he could grasp
what it was about her that was so gripping.
-There's a lot of speculation that much of the tension
between Prince Charles and Princess Diana
began on that first tour to Australia and New Zealand
because Prince Charles was quickly realizing
he was not the star in this relationship.
-It bothers him, you know. Of course it would.
And as Diana keeps growing and her star keeps rising,
it becomes clear that Diana is not just a minor member
of the royal family who people like a lot.
She is a global superstar,
and she is always going to be that way.
And that is going to be a big problem for Charles.
-And soon, the birth of her second child
will rupture the couple's relationship
forever.
Two years after delivering the crown, its new heir,
Diana, expands the royal family again
with the birth of her second son, Harry.
-With the birth of Harry,
now you had the heir and the spare.
Diana's job was complete,
and it seemed like they were very happy, actually.
Diana said later that the month she was pregnant
with Harry were the happiest in her marriage.
-But Harry's arrival soon presents
yet another crack in Diana and Charles relationship.
-Charles really wanted a girl, and when he found out
in the delivery room that not only was Harry a boy,
she said something changed in their marriage
that never came back.
I guess, in some archaic way,
he felt that Diana hadn't given him what he wanted.
-However, the royal children, like their mother,
couldn't be more popular with the public and the press.
-The media went absolutely crazy.
They wanted those photos of the kids.
They wanted the photos of Princess Diana
and Prince Charles with the boys.
They were just plastered all over newspapers,
magazines, TV, everywhere you could look.
It was all about the royal babies.
-Once again, Diana breaks with royal tradition,
this time flaunting another long-held royal taboo --
openly showing love toward her boys.
-The royals tended not to show any affection in public
or even behind closed doors, really.
-I think she really wanted to feel her love
in an environment where it's all very kind of stiff.
-The young mother aspires to give her boys
a normal childhood.
-Diana was determined that her children's growth
would not be stunted
by keeping them trapped inside the royal bubble.
She wanted them out in the real world.
She wanted them to meet people
and have childhood experiences like any other child.
-She was not just going to be
having her children taught by tutors.
She was going to let them go to school with other children.
She was going to actually be there for drop-off and pick-up.
She was going to dress them in things like blue jeans,
because that's what boys their age wore.
-They went to amusement parks. They got McDonald's.
There's a great story about when they went to Harrods
to see Father Christmas.
She made them wait in line, just like everybody else.
She wanted to introduce them to normal life, and it's crazy,
but sometimes that was as simple as giving them pocket money
and letting them go buy a treat.
-To the world,
the growing royal family appears happy and content.
But behind palace walls, the tension continues to grow.
-And so the marriage just starts to break down
further and further.
There are screaming matches.
Charles is growing more cold and more distant and meaner.
Diana is becoming more frantic and more volatile,
and it becomes a really cataclysmic marriage
that would lead to really devastating results
for both them and for their children.
-Diana has known, from the beginning of her marriage
with Charles, that Camilla Parker Bowles
is a permanent fixture in his life.
But Princess Diana had suspicions
that it was much more serious than people were letting on.
-She realized that her marriage
would never be the fairy-tale marriage
that she might have imagined at the age of 19.
And how did she cope with such stress
and her experiences with depression?
Through bulimia, an eating disorder.
You see her searching for care.
Searching for love. Searching for connection.
Beating up her own body, at the same time, in her distress.
And nobody was helping her.
-I think she realized the sense of duty
that she had now as the wife of the future king.
And I think she saw these people
and she saw kind of how enchanted
they were with this idea of what it means to be royal.
And she thought, "Okay, I've got to live up to that.
I've got to step up to that."
And I think she kind of wanted
to prove to Charles that she could do it.
I think Diana always had this thing about her
where she wanted to prove people wrong.
-But privately, Diana is hurting.
-At this point,
there is not that much public knowledge
about eating disorders and depression.
Not that many famous people have gone public
with their struggles.
So this is something that a lot of people who have struggled
with these issues can connect to with her
in a way that they've really not had the chance to connect
to famous people
and celebrities talking about these issues before.
-The royal family thought that the problem was Diana.
They saw her mental health
and her eating disorder as the whole problem,
not a symptom of the pressure she was under
and what she was experiencing.
So there was this understanding that if she could just
get herself in order, the marriage would fix itself.
There were many attempts of her trying to go to the queen
to talk about what she was going through,
but nobody was there to give her the help that she needed.
And she went through a very deep depression.
-With those closest to the princess
turning a blind eye to her troubles,
Diana turns to a long-held royal tradition --
seeking help outside the family.
-Diana begins having affairs because
she's not getting love at home.
Why not just take a cue from her husband
and find love outside the home?
So that's what she begins doing.
-First with a Royal Protection Officer, Barry Mannakee,
and then with Major James Hewitt.
Both of them were removed from her household after rumors
of those affairs started swirling among palace staff.
And this kind of fed into her feelings of loneliness
and isolation.
-It's a really unhappy time for her,
and she's really just grasping at straws
and doing anything she can to create her own happiness.
-Seeking a further escape,
the princess turns her attention to charity work.
-I think she had a servant's heart.
She believed that caring about others
and making others happy was the right thing to do,
and it made her feel better, even in her darkest times.
-Once again, Diana breaks new ground
by helping some of society's most neglected.
-On April 9th, 1987, she opened the UK's first HIV/AIDS clinic,
and she notably visited with those patients there
without a mask, without gloves.
-This is during the AIDS epidemic,
when it is still considered essentially a "gay disease"
and something that the mainstream
is really not paying much attention to.
A lot of people are afraid to even touch an AIDS patient
because they're like, "Oh, well, I might catch it."
-The '80s were overshadowed by the AIDS epidemic,
and people living with HIV and AIDS
were completely shunned, and meanwhile,
Princess Di is there telling people they matter,
showing this hug, this love --
none of this needs to be withheld
because of something that is a disease.
-She was photographed hugging them,
shaking their hand,
and this did a lot to de-stigmatize the disease
and to help see those patients as people.
That does a lot to normalize it for the public.
-Diana was different. She was a nurturer.
She was compassionate. She was a well of motherly love.
This is the first time the royal family
had ever shown this to the world.
-The royal family does a lot of charity work,
but they do it by showing up for ribbon cuttings
and hosting tasteful benefits.
They are not the kind of people who will hug an AIDS patient
because they're not the kind of people who hug anyone.
That's not how they do their work.
So for Diana to be doing her charity work in the style
that she is, is just a big,
big change from the way the royal family does things.
-Princess Diana was a champion of the underdog
by putting a spotlight on their issues.
And I think for many people, they related to her
because you don't see somebody with the common touch.
-Two years later, in 1989,
Diana shows a very different side of herself.
She attends a birthday party for Annabel Elliot,
the sister of Diana's romantic rival,
Camilla Parker Bowles, and goes on the attack.
-She confronts her and says, "I know about you and Charles.
I know what's happening between you.
You aren't just clever as you think.
The secret is not a secret. I know about it."
-Diana is able to look her in the face and essentially say,
"Why won't you leave us alone? What more do you want?"
And Camilla answers her, saying that,
"Well, you have everything.
And I'm just, you know, being with the man that I love."
-This was a real moment of change for her, of her saying,
"I'm going to embrace my life, and I'm not just going to be
a victim of fate, circumstance, or duty anymore."
-In June 1992, Diana seizes the upper hand
when the biography "Diana: Her True Story" drops.
The Andrew Morton-penned book is an instant bestseller.
-It is hanging all the dirty laundry out to dry
so the whole world can see it.
We know that Charles is not a good husband.
We know that she does not want to be in that marriage anymore,
and he hasn't wanted to be in it for a long time.
This is not a happy marriage, and it's all laid bare
in Andrew Morton's book.
-Behind the scenes,
Diana has been struggling with her mental health
and her eating disorder.
She struggles with that throughout the pregnancy.
-She even had a suicide attempt at one point,
when she threw herself down the stairs.
Like, things were very serious.
-But the palace is more concerned with the fallout
than Diana's well-being.
-That is, again, the number one sin for the royal family,
is going on record and speaking about the royal family,
about the private world of the royals.
-Publicly, Diana denies having anything to do
with Morton's book,
but privately...
-She was secretly sending him audio files of her story,
what she was going through, talking about her marriage,
her depression, her affairs.
And it really shook the royal family.
And this was definitely the beginning of the end
of the marriage of Charles and Diana.
-Diana's tell-all marks a clear line in the sand
with the royal family,
and she's not done shocking the world yet.
-Two months after the Diana tell-all
rocks the royal family,
the princess continues making waves when the British tabloid
"The Sun" releases what are known as
the Squidgygate tapes.
-Squidgygate is essentially the leaking of tapes of Diana
talking on the phone with a man named James Gilbey,
who she may have been having an affair with.
-On those tapes, you can hear James Gilbey
refer to Diana as Squidge or Squidgy
over the course of that phone call.
So this is a relationship where she is clearly seeking
that affection that has been closed off to her,
time and time again.
In providing information for Andrew Morton's book,
Diana had conveniently omitted her own extramarital affairs.
So it wasn't until the Squidgygate tapes
came out in 1992
that the public was clued in to,
"Oh, there might be even more going on here."
-This definitely raised some red flags for Diana
because, after these phone calls were released, she was like,
"How did this happen? Who could have done this?"
-There is a theory that the royal family,
or someone working in the royal family,
intentionally taped this conversation and leaked it.
-Some believe it's payback for the Andrew Morton book.
-It becomes harder and harder to keep up this image
of a happy royal couple.
That light that used to shine forth from Diana
when she was in these social situations is no longer there.
-There was a famous photo of the two of them
stood next to each other.
And you can just feel the energy.
And I think a newspaper captioned the photograph
"The Glums," because they look so miserable.
-These two are not happy.
Why are they putting on the show?
Everybody knows the truth.
-Then, on December 9th, 1992, the palace drops a bombshell
when it announces the prince and princess are separating.
-This was not a legal divorce at this point.
It was just a separation of their households, their staff.
-When they separate, Diana stays at Kensington Palace
and has to cope with being this outsider
but still being part of the royal family.
It's a very strange situation, and a very hard one to navigate.
-After the announcement, the palace puts out a statement
essentially saying there were no third parties
involved in the dissolution of this marriage.
In other words, nobody was having an affair.
We all know that that's a lie. None of that is true.
-It felt like we were living a reality show,
like "The Real Housewives of Royalty."
Like, this was something that we'd never seen before
in a royal family, with so many different storylines
going on at the same time.
I mean, if cameras were rolling,
you would have reality-TV gold.
-1992 is not a year
on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure.
It has turned out to be an annus horribilis.
-This is a PR disaster for the royal family.
-It's a real moment of royal crisis.
It almost seems to be the present
saying, "The past is no longer."
All of those ways of just the stiff upper lip of duty,
we don't live in those times anymore.
-But the fallout is more than just a PR issue.
-The crumbling of the marriage for Charles and Diana
definitely took its toll on William and Harry.
Diana wanted that family nucleus for her boys.
-I get the sense that, for William and Harry,
they both saw the writing on the wall.
-Despite the public optimism that Charles and Diana
do not plan to divorce, privately,
a royal reconciliation appears unlikely.
-There's a lot of narrative spinning from both sides.
Charles's camp is saying, "Oh, Diana's hysterical.
She is just not suited for this life.
She doesn't have the mental strength for it
or the fortitude."
Diana says Charles is cold
and was unfaithful to her from the start,
and she was left with no choice
but to have her affairs and leave this marriage.
-The princess underscores her point when she appears
at a fundraising dinner at Kensington Gardens
and makes this unspoken statement.
-Princess Diana was a marketing and PR genius.
And that night, Diana went to an event
and wore a very un-royal, very sexy dress
that has now been dubbed, for all eternity,
as "the revenge dress."
-Any woman scorned is going to make sure
that she showcases female-to-female competition
and that she would be a victor.
Well, she could never have what Camilla Parker Bowles
had in her husband, which was his heart,
but she could win over this female competition
in other areas.
Diana was younger. She was more beautiful.
She was fashionable.
Camilla was none of this.
-It's the moment we all want to have,
once we've kind of separated from our ex-partners
or if someone's cheated on you.
You want that moment where you step out
and you can just say "[Bleep]" through an outfit.
It's the ultimate power move.
-Prince Charles could have found a cure for cancer
and all eyes would have been on Princess Diana
in that revenge dress.
-So not only was Diana finding her voice, she also,
in turn, was becoming a fashion icon at the same time.
This is the new Diana,
and she really used fashion to her advantage
to send a lot of different messages.
-A year later, Diana sends another message
when she bares her soul
in a highly anticipated interview with journalist
Martin Bashir on the popular BBC news program "Panorama."
-Diana decided to sit down
and have this very candid talk and conversation,
and she kind of laid it all out there,
which was something that the palace never does,
because their motto is, "Never complain, never explain."
-I don't want a divorce,
but obviously we need clarity on a situation.
-Diana's interview with Martin Bashir
was a very, very big, earth-shattering deal.
-She points to the couple's Australia trip,
less than two years after their wedding,
as the beginning of a deep rift in their relationship.
-Three cheers for Lady Di! -Hip-hip-hooray!
-Diana said that Charles resented her
for becoming so well-liked and so popular pretty much overnight
and eclipsed him.
-Princess Di was really astounded by this.
He's seeing her as competition.
Nobody should see their spouse as competition.
-She let it all out there.
-She confirms that she has had affairs.
She talks about how she doesn't necessarily think
Charles is going to be able to adapt to being king
and that he might not ever be king.
She talks about depression and bulimia and self-harm,
and her fairy-tale princess life
was really very tortured on the inside.
-Then I was unwell with post-natal depression.
-She talks frankly about all sorts of things
that have never been talked about,
before that point, by the royal family,
at least not with regard to their own experiences.
-When asked about the not-so-secret strain
on her marriage, the princess doesn't hold back.
-Well, there were three of us in this marriage,
so it was a bit crowded.
-Meaning herself, Charles, and Camilla.
She confirms that she has had affairs.
She talks about Charles's affair with Camilla.
And this is something that makes her
seem really human to a lot of people.
It becomes a thing that makes her not just a star
and not just a princess,
but also a human being who people love more than ever now.
-But Diana's most shocking criticism
is aimed directly at the crown.
-I am a very strong person.
That causes complications
in the system that I live in.
-She spoke about how she believed the institution
of the monarchy was kind of out to get her.
And it really was this "wow" moment,
and it caused craziness in the UK,
and there was so much outrage from the royal family.
-It's clear that the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana
has become irretrievably broken down
and that the only path forward is a divorce.
-A divorce that will free Diana from the crown's restraints
but ultimately chase her to the grave.
-Is the marriage of Prince Charles
and Princess Diana officially about to end?
-This was something that Diana never wanted.
She never wanted a broken marriage.
She wanted to save her marriage to Charles.
She did everything that she possibly could.
-In London, Princess Diana huddled with her lawyer today
to discuss the queen's call
for an early divorce from Prince Charles.
In the past, her lawyers said, the princess has not agreed
to the divorce sought by Charles and the queen.
But that was before the release of the queen's letter,
urging them both to bring a formal end
to their 14-year-old marriage.
-The word "divorce" is not in the royal vocabulary.
Like, that just does not happen.
-Diana -- she is no longer Her Royal Highness.
She's still a princess, but she's not an HRH.
-William and Harry were very "Team Mom" in this situation.
There's a story that when Diana loses her title, her HRH,
William comes to her and says,
"Don't worry, Mummy, when I'm king,
I'll give it back to you."
There's this sense that they are going to be
looking out for her legacy and preserving her interests
as much as they can.
-She immediately sees herself, once again, completely isolated,
and now she's not even in the family in an official capacity.
She's kind of on her own again.
-This is a turning point for Diana.
She's no longer that naive 19-year-old
who is a preschool teacher.
She is a mother. She is a woman who has toured the world.
She has shaken hands with diplomats.
She herself has been an ambassador for her nation.
And I think this was a real moment of change for her,
of her saying, "I'm going to embrace my life,
and I'm not just going to be a victim of fate,
circumstance, or duty anymore."
-After the divorce,
Diana is no longer a member of the royal family,
but in a lot of ways, she's a bigger star than she ever was.
She starts traveling the world,
doing her philanthropy and being dressed
by everyone who wants to get their clothes out there.
She becomes this enormous fashion icon.
She is the biggest superstar in the world.
-She's truly embracing her place on the world stage
as a humanitarian.
She's talking about the causes
and walking the walk with those causes.
-Diana took up the cause of banning land mines.
On a visit to Angola,
she visited with amputees who had lost limbs
due to land mines, and she posed for photo ops.
She is famously filmed walking across a field
full of land mines, and at the end, the photographers
are, like, joking around with her and are like,
"Oh, we didn't quite get all our footage. Could you do it again?
Ha ha ha." And Diana's like, "Sure."
And she walks around and goes back
through this dangerous field full of explosives
one more time, because she's very committed
to using as much of her star power
as she can to bring attention to this cause.
-Diana is truly living her best life at this point.
She truly is embracing that star power she has.
She's truly embracing her place on the world stage
as a humanitarian.
She's talking about the causes
and walking the walk with those causes.
-I'm only trying to highlight
a problem that's going on all around the world.
That's all.
-It was such a profound statement.
It just made her look so fierce and so strong
and like she could overcome anything.
And she was that person.
-Diana also embraces her new-found romantic freedom.
-After she divorces Charles, Diana has a chance
to date openly for basically the first time in her life.
Right? She'd never had a serious boyfriend before Charles.
And her first real relationship, post-divorce,
is with Hasnat Khan.
-Hasnat Khan was a Pakistani heart surgeon
who Diana had met one day
when she was touring his hospital.
She really admired him.
He was very kind and compassionate.
-Diana's new beau is unlike anything the staunch Anglo crown
could have anticipated for the newly single ex-monarch.
-She was dating a man who was a person of color,
and that brought its own racist undertones.
-They fell really deeply in love
and had a very secret relationship
that she managed to keep completely hidden
from the press, which, again, shows you
how smart she was, that she managed to do that.
-She referred to him as Mr. Wonderful
and really envisioned a life for them together.
She went to Pakistan to meet his parents.
She was very invested in making this work.
-She wanted to marry him. Prince William was on board.
They really, really liked him.
And she wanted to take that next step with him.
-But Khan isn't comfortable in the harsh glare
of the media spotlight.
-Diana had a vision of their future relationship,
where she would still be in the public eye
and she would still be championing
her charitable causes.
Hasnat Khan was not interested in that lifestyle.
-He was just too overwhelmed by the press attention.
He was saying, "I just cannot deal with this.
I cannot deal with this, Diana." And so they broke up.
-Little did Khan know how right he was.
The paparazzi will chase Diana and her next suitor
to the grave.
Soon after her split to Hasnat Khan,
Diana has a date with destiny when she's invited
to the French villa of a family friend --
billionaire businessman Mohamayed Al-Fayed.
-Diana accepted, and she took along William and Harry,
and it was there that she met Dodi Al-Fayed.
-Dodi was the son of Mohamayed Al-Fayed,
an Egyptian billionaire,
who owns the famous department store in London called Harrods.
Dodi was a playboy, and he was the complete opposite of Hasnat
and completely different to Charles.
When him and Diana got together, he was already dating someone,
a model called Kelly Fisher.
-Dodi seems to have been kind of ambivalent
about this relationship.
He was pushed into it by his father, Mohamayed Al-Fayed,
who seems to have been fascinated with institutions
of British wealth and aristocracy.
So getting his son together
with a former member of the royal family
would have been a big deal for him.
-At first, Diana and Dodi's relationship
appears mostly platonic,
but then things start to develop between them.
-Dodi was notably already engaged to somebody else.
That somebody else unfortunately found out
that he was dating Princess Diana,
thanks to the tabloids.
She had no idea.
That's what happens, oftentimes,
when you're with somebody like Princess Diana.
You end up in the tabloids, even if you don't plan to.
-I think Dodi was somebody that Diana was able to confide in,
who understood what she was dealing with
and who helped her have a good time.
-I don't think they were in love.
I think she was just having fun.
Princess Diana's dating pool, if you think about it,
was pretty small.
She basically needed somebody
who lived the same elite lifestyle that she lived.
And he also offered her protection and security,
which she really, really needed
because she didn't have the royal protection anymore.
-She was just enjoying herself.
And if you look at her, she really was just at her peak.
She looked really healthy and happy.
Every time you see her, she's smiling.
-But as Diana and Dodi grow closer,
the paparazzi's feeding frenzy becomes insatiable.
-The press is on her tail the whole time.
They have their long lenses.
They have their paparazzi on the ground.
They're being followed everywhere.
Even when she couldn't see the paparazzi,
the paparazzi could see her.
-I don't think someone who hasn't experienced it
can understand what Diana's life was like.
You're living in an alternate reality.
The paparazzi is getting
absolutely out of control at this point.
It's really invasive and abusive.
And I don't think Diana was enjoying
their attention anymore.
I think she'd become very paranoid, very fearful,
very over all of the tabloid intrusion.
And there's a very famous photo of Dodi and Diana
on a yacht kissing, and it was called "The Kiss."
And it was this huge media sensation
and what really alerted a lot of the world to their relationship.
-That photo is one of the most expensive paparazzi photos
ever taken.
-As usual, not all of the publicity is flattering.
-There is all of this buzz
around her relationship with Dodi
that's not exactly the kind of aspirational,
"Oh, look at the fairy-tale princess" attention
that she used to receive.
It's more like, "Well, this is a little bit tacky
and maybe sordid,
and we aren't sure we like this for Diana."
-Diana is bucking every convention there is out there.
She is rebelling against the monarchy.
She is doing things that nobody else
in the royal family is doing.
She is openly and unapologetically dating Muslims.
She is openly and unapologetically dating people
who do not have white skin.
-This drew a lot of controversy because, you know, she is
the mother of a future king and she is dating a man
that many of them would not find desirable.
-She wanted, maybe, to throw it in the palace's face,
like, "Look at me, I'm happy,
and I'm in this new relationship,
and I'm living my best life."
-One month into their relationship,
Diana and Dodi take a trip
that will forever alter the course of royal history.
On August 30th, 1997, the pair travel to Paris to stay at
Dodi's father's hotel, the Ritz, and take in the sights.
-They were in and out of the hotel,
shopping and things like that.
She was getting ready to go back home to her boys.
She's had a phone call with them saying that she was
going to see them soon,
and she was wrapping up her trip.
-But they're not alone.
-The paparazzi were following them everywhere.
They were parked right outside the hotel,
waiting for them to come and go.
Are they on a shopping trip?
Are they coming back from a shopping trip?
And eventually, Diana and Dodi snuck out.
-Dodi goes out to buy Diana some jewelry,
and then they do plan to leave the Ritz for dinner.
Unfortunately, there are throngs of photographers
outside the hotel,
which just make them very uneasy.
They return to the Ritz for dinner and,
later that night, plan to spend the evening at Dodi's apartment
by the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
When they're getting ready to leave the hotel,
they attempt to send a decoy car
out the front entrance of the hotel
to kind of lead the paparazzi away
while they slip out the back.
They get into a black Mercedes.
They are driven by Henri Paul,
the head of security at the Ritz Hotel,
who -- chauffeuring was not in his job description.
They're also accompanied by a protection officer,
Trevor Rees-Jones.
And when Dodi and Diana get into the back of this Mercedes,
it's supposed that nobody was wearing a seatbelt.
They peel away from the Ritz Hotel
just around midnight on August 31st
and are immediately chased by paparazzi,
some of whom are on motorbikes.
-The paparazzi are going wild.
They're speeding along,
driving very, very aggressively, trying to get photographs.
-And the paparazzi were right on their tail.
The paparazzi sped up. The paparazzi surrounded them.
And their driver drove faster and faster and faster.
Faster than was safe.
Faster than made sense.
-But the driver of Diana and Dodi's car
is not in a condition
to be responding well to that kind of pressure.
[ Tires screech, crashing ]
-Shortly after midnight on August 31st, 1997,
Princess Diana and her new love interest,
millionaire playboy Dodi Al-Fayed,
are racing through the streets of Paris,
trying to escape the paparazzi.
-They come up on this tunnel.
The speed limit of the tunnel is about 30 miles per hour.
-But their driver, Henri Paul,
pushes the limo to over 120 miles per hour.
-As they enter the tunnel, he loses control of the vehicle.
The car crashes.
[ Tires screech, crashing ]
-It's been reported in the last few minutes
that Diana, Princess of Wales,
has been seriously injured in a car crash in Paris.
-The initial reports were hopeful,
saying that Diana hadn't been seriously injured.
-But the news coverage kept going and going
and getting a little bit more serious as time went on.
-Diana, Princess of Wales,
has been seriously injured in a car accident in Paris.
-According to footage and testimony
from paparazzi who were there,
Diana is still alive for quite some time after the crash.
There are a couple of paparazzi members
who are trying to help her and doing CPR.
There are others who are just taking photographs
of the wreckage.
The French ambulance comes.
This is a decision
that will eventually become quite controversial.
But in France, the system is if there has been an accident,
you do as much work
as you can to get the person stable on the scene.
This is different from the UK or the US,
where you try and get the person out of the scene of the accident
as quickly as possible and bring them to a hospital.
So the French ambulance workers are trying to help
Diana out at the scene of the wreckage.
-The princess is reported to have been taken to hospital.
-She is still alive when they get there.
-But then the news takes a tragic turn.
-Diana, Princess of Wales,
has been killed in a car accident
and that her partner, Dodi Fayed,
has also been killed.
-Our first thoughts must be with her children and family
at this time of immense loss to them.
-It is this enormously shocking moment.
This is someone who we have been following
since she was 19 years old.
Now she's 36.
No one is expecting her to have died
all of a sudden, at this moment where it really seemed
like her true adult life of freedom was just beginning.
-It took people's breath away.
How could the people's princess have died in a car crash?
It was just unbelievable.
-I remember exactly where I was when I found out
Princess Diana died.
We were in disbelief. "This can't be true."
-There's so much confusion after the crash
and after Diana's death,
people didn't know what had happened.
Three of the passengers in the car were dead.
The bodyguard had been severely injured,
so he couldn't tell what had happened.
Nobody really knew what was going on.
-Tests will later confirm
the driver, Henri Paul, had more than three times
France's legal limit of alcohol in his blood.
But some believe the paparazzi are equally to blame
for the accident.
-Princess Diana was literally hunted down
into a Paris tunnel, and as she lay dying,
the same people who were chasing her down
were taking pictures of her dying breath.
That's how bad it got.
-Others think the palace may have been involved
in Diana's death.
-Mohamayed Al-Fayed really became the catalyst of a lot
of these conspiracy theories.
He was dealing with enormous grief, of course,
and he really started to hint
that something sinister was afoot.
-Mohamayed Al-Fayed -- he was convinced
that the royal family had taken Diana and Dodi out.
-The French government does a pretty thorough
investigation of all of this.
They look into all of the questions,
and they eventually come to the conclusion
that the driver was under the influence.
The fault lies with him, ultimately.
-Diana's death sends the entire world into mourning.
People flock to Kensington Palace
to pay their respects.
Diana was such a beautiful person.
And nobody will ever replace her.
-I still can't believe this is happening now.
I don't think I'll believe it until I actually see her coffin.
-There were flowers that went up to people's knees,
with mourners just putting them out.
People just weeping publicly in the streets
and comforting one another about Diana's passing.
It was almost like they lost a member of their own family,
and people didn't know how to deal with their grief.
-Including the royal family, who is vacationing
at their country house at Balmoral, Scotland.
-This had to be an unbelievably difficult moment
for Prince Charles.
How do you tell your two sons that their mother had died?
It was definitely a devastating situation and something
that, unfortunately, they'd have to remember forever.
-The queen initially saw Diana's death as a personal,
private family affair.
Diana was technically not
a member of the royal family anymore,
so she didn't believe
that she needed to make a public statement.
-The queen's official stance is like,
"Well, we only lower flags and things like that
if an HRH dies, and that's not Diana."
So the country is outraged.
There is all of this, "Wow,
you can't even pretend to feel sorry she's dead."
And it's kind of emblematic of the problem
that the royal family has always had with Diana, right?
Which is she rarely follows the forms
that they understand to be extremely important.
-We are today, a nation in Britain, in a state of shock,
in mourning, in grief that is so deeply painful for us.
She touched the lives of so many others, in Britain
and throughout the world, with joy and with comfort.
She was the people's princess, and that's how she will stay,
how she will remain in our hearts
and in our memories forever.
-Tony Blair, the prime minister at the time, is the one who saw
that the public was getting angrier and angrier,
and he dares to go to the Queen of England and say,
"You are not doing the correct thing.
You have to leave Balmoral. You have to come to London.
This has to be a huge funeral,
and you need to pay tribute to Diana."
Queen Elizabeth finally understood,
"I need to address the nation," and she did.
And the speech she gave was really moving and touching.
-I want to pay tribute to Diana myself.
She was an exceptional and gifted human being
in good times and bad.
She never lost her capacity to smile and laugh,
nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness.
I admired and respected her
for her energy and commitment to others,
and especially for her devotion to her two boys.
No one who knew Diana will ever forget her.
Millions of others, who never met her
but felt they knew her, will remember her.
I, for one, believe there are lessons
to be drawn from her life
and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death.
I share in your determination to cherish her memory.
-Like Diana, the queen even takes the extraordinary step
of speaking with everyday Britons outside the palace.
-Even in death, Diana was shifting the way
that the monarchy did things.
Never before had we seen Queen Elizabeth get up close
and personal with the public like that before.
-Diana was such a beloved figure.
That's how strong her influence was
and how she was able to just keep changing the royal family
even after she had died.
-The next day, on September 6th, the world stops to watch England
lay the people's princess to rest.
-This funeral is an object of intense fascination,
like everything about Diana.
It has more than twice as many viewers as watched her wedding.
This is 2.5 billion viewers worldwide.
That's an enormous amount of the world's population.
-We all remember those heartbreaking pictures
of the boys walking behind the casket.
They clearly couldn't even look at it.
Harry later said it was like an out-of-body experience,
that he really just heard the hooves of a horse.
He had to disassociate from what was going on
because of the trauma.
-On the coffin,
there is this arrangement of flowers and a little card
over it on which Harry has written in this messy
12-year-old-boy handwriting, "Mummy."
That really just speaks to the tragedy of this moment.
-Harry has talked about what that moment did to him
and how it affected his mental health,
because he said that there was thousands
and thousands of people
crying about his mother who they didn't know,
and he couldn't find those tears because he was just
so overwhelmed about what was going on,
that it really stayed with him for a very long time,
even to this day.
-The funeral reaches an emotional capstone
with Diana's younger brother, Charles Spencer,
delivering a moving eulogy.
-I stand before you today,
the representative of a family in grief
in a country in mourning before a world in shock.
-Princess Diana's brother did not hold back.
He criticized the press.
He talked frankly about how they always chased her down.
She was not treated like a human.
She was treated like prey.
-I don't think she ever understood why her genuinely
good intentions were sneered at by the media.
Why there appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf
to bring her down.
It is baffling.
My own and only explanation
is that genuine goodness is threatening
to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum.
-He was echoing what I think a lot of people around the world
felt at that time -- that Princess Di would be alive
if not for the paparazzi.


-Though tragedy takes England's rose well before her time,
her influence will shape the next generation of royals
in unprecedented ways.

[ Fanfare plays ]
[ Applause ]
Years after her death,
Diana's impact continues to reshape the monarchy.
In 2005,
Prince Charles finally marries the true love of his life,
Camilla Parker Bowles.
The crown, for the first time ever,
seemingly sanctions love over duty.
-It's almost ironic that he kind of has Diana
to thank for that, because, you know,
she changed the way the monarchy works.
She changed the rules of the monarchy.
She changed the way the queen viewed marriage.
-Camilla, who was at one time the most hated woman in England,
has really warmed over a lot of people.
She's known, actually, as a very kind, funny,
open, approachable person and has made Charles,
everyone says, just a completely changed man.
And by all accounts, they are very happy.
-Diana's influence is felt by the Crown's next gen, as well.
Her sons.
-I see a lot of Diana in both of them, in very different ways.
With William, I kind of see Diana in the sense
that you can tell he's quite a sweet, caring person,
and he does a lot for charity in the same way that Diana did.
-He's very low-key and understated,
and he's very charming.
Folks who meet him say he's very personable and approachable,
but he also is like Charles in that he knows his duty.
And he has become more reserved over time,
and he's become more regal over time,
as you probably should if you're the future King of England.
-In 2001, William meets Kate Middleton
while at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Within two years, they begin dating -- a choice made entirely
by the prince, not the palace,
just as his mother would have had it.
-Diana reportedly told William, you know,
"You need to really know who you marry."
And so William and Kate dated forever.
They have a real long-term, adult,
foundational relationship.
-I don't think there was ever going to be a question
of a so-called arranged marriage for Prince William.
He had that normal upbringing, he had those college years
where he could cultivate relationships.
[ Crowd cheering ]
-I think, since Princess Diana's death,
there had been so much grieving for Princess Diana
and the legacy that she left behind.
And seeing her son happy and marrying a "commoner,"
again, just like Princess Diana once was,
getting married in the same place as his mom --
all of those things were definitely tributes
and influenced, in many ways, by the legacy of his mom.
I think that Prince William got what his mother never had
and what Prince Charles didn't have at first,
which is that he was able to marry for true love
while also staying on the path to being the future king.
-William and Kate quickly produced their own heirs --
first, Prince George in 2013,
then Princess Charlotte two years later in 2015,
and finally, Prince Louis in 2018.
-Family is definitely important to him,
which I think is something that he picked up from Diana.
He is a doting father to his three children
and has been married to his wife,
Duchess Kate, for a number of years.
So he is very much a family man, but is also very much devoted
to the crown and devoted to his duty.
-Diana's other son, Harry, faces a much more difficult path
without his mother's guiding hand.
-Diana once expressed that the royal family
would take care of the heir,
would look after William, but she took it upon herself
to look after the spare -- Prince Harry.
So Diana was very careful to compensate for Harry,
to give him her attention and lots of love.
-But Diana's death changes everything for the younger son.
-When your mother passes away in such a public fashion,
it is a very hard thing to grapple with, for anyone,
but let alone a 12-year-old.
He went into his young-adult years
with that chip on his shoulder,
that his mother had been wronged.
And he struggled to reconcile the role of the press,
the role of his own family in her death.
-He is dating around a lot. He is using drugs.
He is the "prince rebel" to William's good, dutiful son.
-He was really having a lot of trouble growing up.
And, you know, now he's been very open
about the fact that he was going through
some really severe mental-health problems
relating to the trauma of the death of his mother
and his upbringing.
And that's why he was acting out so much.
[ Camera shutters clicking ]
-In 2016,
Harry's life takes an unexpected turn when a friend sets him up
on a blind date with American actress Meghan Markle.
-They met together at a bar.
They instantly hit it off,
and their romance really, really took off.
-The young prince sees many of his mother's traits in Meghan.
-They both were compassionate. They were both human.
They both owned their flaws.
Harry famously said he thinks that Meghan and Diana
would have been thick as thieves.
If Diana were still around,
they would have loved each other.
-The women share something else in common.
They're both heavily scrutinized by the press.
-Meghan Markle -- I mean, she was slammed by the media,
and it was largely the British media,
but it was also in the US.
There was a lot of attention on the fact
that not only was she not British,
but she was divorced, but specifically the fact
that she was black -- she was interracial.
-This coverage is really quite racist.
You see headlines like
"Harry's New Honey is Straight Outta Compton"
or in talking about her as being "ghetto."
There's this sense that Harry is dating beneath his status
by dating a woman of color.
-Harry was not having it.
He went to the royal family and said,
"You know, this is my girlfriend.
This is somebody that I am serious with.
I am releasing a statement that they need to back off."
And that is exactly what he did.
-Asking the press to not be racist
and to not attack her --
that was a bold move by a royal, and it was something
that very much felt like it
was influenced by his late mother.
I think that it's something that Princess Diana
would have been really proud of.
-On May 19th, 2018, the couple marry
at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle.
-Their wedding, which featured a black reverend
and a gospel choir, bucked tradition in many ways.
It felt very much like moving the monarchy forward
and bringing attention in a positive way towards change.
[ Crowd cheering ]
-Though Meghan is widely popular among Britons
in the initial months after their marriage,
by autumn of that year, the public tide turns.

-She was dubbed "Princess Pushy" in the media
because a lot of her aides were either quitting or being fired.
There were reports that maybe she was bullying people.
She was answering e-mails at 6:00 in the morning,
which, you know, the royal family doesn't do.
So I think that, maybe, rubbed people the wrong way.
-The media scrutiny only got worse,
and Meghan suddenly found herself in a royal family
that was not very welcoming.
Just like Princess Diana, she felt very lonely,
and she began to have her own struggles with mental health.
-So the prince makes a shocking move.
-Breaking news tonight -- the Duke and Duchess of Sussex
have announced that they are carving out
what they call a new role for themselves.
They say they intend to step back
as senior members of the royal family
and work to become financially independent.
-The world was absolutely rocked when it was announced
that Harry and Meghan were leaving the royal family.
-And I think jaws were on the floor, like,
"This has never been done before.
Somebody just doesn't elect to leave
one of the most prestigious families in the entire world."
-When she began to have mental-health problems
by being in that royal bubble,
Prince Harry took action because here's a mother he could save.
He couldn't save his own mother,
but he can save the mother of his children.
-After initially moving to Canada,
Harry, Meghan, and their one-year-old son, Archie,
eventually relocate to Montecito, California,
near Santa Barbara.
Like Diana's explosive
1995 interview with journalist Martin Bashir...
-Well, there were three of us in this marriage,
so it was a bit crowded.
-...in March 2021,
Harry and Meghan give their own exclusive interview to Oprah,
explaining their decision.
-There were some real obvious signs,
before we even got married,
that this was going to be really hard.
-I left my career, my life.
I left everything because I love him, right?
-In that interview, it's revealed that Meghan
has struggled with her mental health,
that she had suicidal thoughts
while a member of the royal family,
and that help was not only not offered to her
but denied to her.
There were also the allegations of racism
within the royal family, where Meghan expressed
that certain individuals in the family
had questioned what color her children's skin would be.
-At the time, it was awkward. I was a bit shocked.
-Can you tell us what the question was?
-No, I don't -- I'm not comfortable sharing that.
-Many royal watchers believe the interview causes a deep
and possible irrevocable rift
between Harry and some within the royal family.
-There have been reports that Charles and Harry
have not spoken in 18 months,
that William and Harry do not speak to each other very often.
-But on July 1st, 2021,
the brothers set aside their differences
for the dedication of the statue of their mother
in the sunken garden at Kensington Palace
on what would have been her 60th birthday.
-All smiles, they would have known the world was watching,
but this felt like a genuine reunion.
Two sons who have had their troubles coming together
with Princess Diana's brother and sisters
to remember their mother.
-Before Diana, it was all about duty trumping love.
It was all about what was best for the royal family,
what was best for the crown, what was best for the monarchy.
But after Diana, you saw that shift.
You even saw it with Charles choosing his love story
and finally marrying Camilla.
Harry married Meghan just for love,
and William married Kate, so it was definitely --
it's almost like the monarchy took a little bit of a back seat
when it came to relationships.
And that's, I think, in testament to Diana.
-Almost 25 years after that tragic night in Paris,
Princess Diana's impact is still being felt.
-I think Diana's legacy is that, in many ways,
she brought the royal family from the past to the present.
And by that, I mean she turned them
into something that's more human.
She transformed them from an institution
that was about palace walls,
about tradition, about keeping up appearances.
And she transformed them into something that was also human,
that also had hurt, that also had a vulnerability,
and that people could make mistakes in
and that they could forge their own paths in.
They didn't just have to be trapped there.
They could start writing their own stories if they wanted to.
And none of that would happen if not for Diana.